


The Choice You Keep Making

by EuphoricSound



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Caretaking, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:39:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EuphoricSound/pseuds/EuphoricSound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Clint is feeling unmade, there is only one thing that soothes him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Choice You Keep Making

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so, so much to Sidhera for listening to my endless ranting about this fic and for offering such good insight. I have a bit of a fascination with Clint’s recovery after he comes back from Loki’s mind-control, so this has been rolling around in my brain for awhile. Also fits the fluff bingo prompt sunrise/sunset.

It was a beautifully crisp morning, and autumn had breathed red and gold into the foliage of the deep wilderness. Clint kicked a stone in front of his feet while he carefully slid between the trees and thickets. He busied his mind with aiming it at targets deeper along the trail through the forest. Targets he hit, every time. But if he didn’t keep his thoughts focused on this, he feared the direction they would wander on their own. 

He wasn’t sure why he always sought out Natasha when he was feeling this way. Hardship usually made him crave solitude. On these days, however, on the days when his memory touched too close to the suffocating grip of Loki’s magic on his identity, solitude bred something that felt too close to madness. On these days, there was only one thing that soothed the tumult. 

She was a bit frustrating to find today. She’d been assigned to test a new piece reconnaissance tech, deep in the wilderness not too far from one of SHIELD’s North American bases. She had stopped in to see him before she left, and from the way she’d narrowed her eyes at him, he knew she’d leave a trail for him to follow. 

So he picked his way along through the underbrush, tracking his partner and kicking the small stone out in front of himself. Sure, it was a trail, but it was a fucking hard trail, and he was getting irritated. How deep in the fucking woods did one actually have to go to test a little piece of Russian spy tech? After five hours of walking, he was really making the little rock pay for Natasha’s obviously intentionally bullshit excuse for trail markers.

When he quite suddenly found himself in a small, grassy clearing strewn with camping gear, bits of tech, a half-dug firepit, a stack of firewood, three large battery packs, and one Natasha, he breathed what felt like his first air in hours. 

She was faced away from him and lifted a hand in greeting, but didn’t say anything. He’d made no attempt to approach with any semblance of stealth, and she was engrossed in her task. So he sighed and busied himself with organizing the camp. 

He set about pitching the tent she’d brought, moving her pack inside and stowing his own alongside it. When he emerged, Natasha was still keying something into the tablet that connected to the device she was testing. As always, however, he felt her awareness of his activities as surely as he felt the slight nip in the early autumn air. Silences between them were so often filled with more important things than words. 

But Clint could not be still, so he finished digging the hole for the fire, stacked the wood and kindling, and neatened the gear she had strewn around the clearing into orderly piles. Once he had finished this, he crossed his arms and let his gaze travel over the campsite to admire his work. When they drifted to Natasha, he found her watching him closely, her eyes betraying a bit more intensity than the smirk on her face. 

She rose, catlike from her crouch on the ground and approached him, keeping her eyes trained on his. Pausing in front of him for a moment, she studied his face, and then lifted her hands to straighten the collar of his coat. 

“Finished nesting?” She said with a tilt of her head and a snicker in her voice, and the sound of her gentle teasing was like a balm. Something of this must have passed over his face, because her expression softened. 

“Clint.” And she was going to say something then, but he saw the moment she changed her mind. “Build us a fire, let’s eat something.”

And so, as the sun set, he built a fire and they ate in silence. Afterwards, Natasha procured a large flask from her pack in the tent, took a swig, and handed it to him. The surprising strength of the first draught made him choke a bit in surprise. This was real, Russian vodka, and he knew she guarded her store of it greedily. He glanced over to find her grinning toothily at him. 

“In Soviet Russia, dessert wine drinks you.” She said, her old Russian accent flaring to life in her husky alto.

He laughed in spite of himself. Laughed with genuine mirth, and he could kiss her because fuck, it felt good to laugh. 

So they drank and they talked. And Natasha had more than one flask, so they kept on drinking and talking and laughing. Atsome point, the conversation lapsed into easy silence. As the night deepened and the nip in the air became a chill, one of them had drawn a blanket up to encompass both their shoulders. The world was hazy and the fire was warm and Natasha was seated beside him, shoulder pressed into his as they both stared at the fire and let their attention meld with the sensations and sounds so unique to the deep forests of the world. 

“Bad this time?” She finally asked, breaking the comfortable silence with a bit of regret in her voice. 

He shook his head. “Oh, not so much.”

She bumped his shoulder with hers, but waited for him to speak.

He knitted his fingers together and rolled his shoulders. “It’s just that sometimes, I’ll think too hard about it. And it feels…closer.” And then the guilt came crashing in. The terror of wanting to kill his comrades, his world, the terror of compromising his allies to the enemy. The memory of holding a knife to his partner’s throat. To Natasha’s throat.

He felt one of her hands slip between his, threading her graceful fingers through his. 

“Clint.” She used the same tone as she had before they’d eaten. “Being free…it’s a choice you have to keep making. I’ve had to do it every day since I defected.” She let the words hang in the air.

“That choice get any easier?”

“Yes.” She paused, and he knew she was considering her words. “When the choice is worth it.”

He turned to meet her eyes and saw therein her particular brand of fierce strength. 

Something in him responded to it. It was this that kept him coming back to her when he was feeling unmade all over again. She knew what it was to feel this way, knew what it was to struggle with her own mind for dominance and had found the strength to do so. She knew exactly what he had to overcome, and needed him to overcome it.

Clint took pause at this realization. Yes, she needed him to overcome this. Something in the set of her jaw, in the intensity of her gaze confirmed it. Their relationship was…complicated, to say the least, but he knew he felt an integral part of himself rooted deeply in his connection with his partner, friend, lover.

In the silence that had fallen in the wake of her words, he had felt her focused on him with the same gentle patience he had given her all those years ago after the Red Room, and maybe she was feeling a bit of herself rooted in him as well. 

For them, perhaps, there was a mutually assured survival.

He reached for her, tracing her cheekbone with his thumb before sliding his hand through her hair to rest on the back of her neck. He lowered his mouth to hers, letting the air of their breaths mingle for a moment before he kissed her. It was just a light touch of lips at first, one that deepened as naturally as breathing. 

Her arms wrapped around his neck as she maneuvered into his lap, and she was warm and alive and she tasted like vodka and Natasha and everything that held him together at the seams.

Clint pressed a kiss to the skin of her throat and she rewarded him with a soft purr, wrapping her legs around his waist as he whispered her name into her skin.

He felt her life pulse under his lips, and the trust implicit in this position brought an unexpected rush of emotion roaring to the surface. He was suddenly caught in the certainty that he had never loved anything in his life with the same intensity that he loved Natasha Romanoff. 

They were neither of them quite ready to hear those words spoken aloud, but the knowledge was like an electrical charge under his skin. So he tangled his fingers in her hair and dragged her mouth down to his again. He felt her breath catch. This kiss was neither sweet nor sensual. It was raw and graceless and full of the need to be so much closer. 

“Need you, Tasha.” The sound that came from his throat was rough even to his own ears, but he was past the point of caring, and when he looked up into her eyes, the complexity of the emotion that played across her face caused his heart to contract. 

After a moment, she smiled at him and reached down, slowly tugging the black thermal shirt up and off, and her skin was immediately puckered with gooseflesh where her body faced away from the fire. Clint wrapped his arms around her back, drawing her to him and bringing his mouth back to her skin. She draped her arms languidly around his shoulders in response, but he felt the grip of her legs tighten as he brought a hand up to her breast, gently cupping it through the fabric of her bra. 

He unhooked the contraption behind her and gently tossed it down to join her shirt, letting his hands trace a line back up her body from hip to chest, smiling as she shivered. 

Clint used the thumb of one hand to rub slow circles around one nipple as he took the other into his mouth, using just the right combination of tongue and teeth that he knew drove reason from her brain. She sighed loudly, abandoning the lazy drape of her arms across his shoulders in favor of bringing her hands up to the back of his neck, pressing her nails into the sensitive flesh there. It was his turn to moan this time. 

She bent and brought her mouth to his ear, nipping at the lobe.

“I believe you have me at a bit of a disadvantage.” She murmured huskily before she caught the fabric of his shirt and gave him but one warning tug before she pulled it up over his head and leaned back, letting her gaze rake over his torso. A Cheshire grin spread across Natasha’s mouth as she bit her lip. 

His hands found her hips, and he was suddenly lifting her out of his lap, tossing the blanket to the ground, and maneuvering their bodies down on top of it. Their pants were off and tossed to the side in the flurry of motion.

Natasha suddenly hooked her leg around his, using it as leverage to flip them over. She held his eyes as she lowered down onto him, and they both sighed with relief as they fit together as seamlessly as always.

The moment that followed stretched slowly in his mind. The heat from the fire competed with that created by the need under their flesh, knitted together as they were. It seemed in those seconds that they were part firelight themselves, destructive and life giving in equal parts. 

She began to move her hips then, and Clint felt his eyes slip closed as he reached up to run his hands over her skin, finally bringing them down to her hips. 

He increased the pressure of his grip on her as she leaned down suddenly, her face hovering over his. And as he watched, that strange play of emotions crept back into her face. She began to whisper to him in Russian, as though the words were too intimate, too honest for her to utter in English. 

“Clint, I need you here.” 

He felt his eyes widen. She hadn’t stopped moving her hips, and it was all he could do to search for the meaning of her words, but her gaze was locked on his, desperately trying to communicate something to him. 

“I can’t have you leave.” Moisture suddenly, shockingly lit her green gaze. “I need you to make the choice to be free. I need you to choose to be here. I need you.” She said, breathless and suddenly vulnerable. 

Clint’s breath caught in his throat. He hooked an arm tightly around her and used the same method she’d used to flip them both over. He kissed her deeply and thrust into her, and though his Russian wasn’t the fluid native that hers was, he brought his mouth to her ear and nevertheless whispered back to her in her own tongue. 

“I’m here. I’m not leaving.” And he was, and he wouldn’t. 

They were suddenly both unraveling, coming apart. Paradoxically though, being with Natasha like this at this very moment felt a bit more like a remaking. 

After they had both come down and slowly disengaged their bodies, they stayed for a time on the blanket, arms and legs tangled and a new, strange understanding weaving it’s way between them as the fire smoldered to ash. 

—-

Wakefulness found him early the next morning, and he rolled over to discover himself alone in the tent. Furrowing his brow, he sat up, pulled on his cargo pants, and lifted the nylon flap. Predawn light filtered into the small clearing as he emerged. He couldn’t help but draw a slow breath in through his nose. The stillness of the forest was deep enough almost to be a scent in the air. 

And so it was that as the world around him was poised somewhere between sleep and stirring, Natasha slipped back into the clearing, quiet as a whisper. Her red locks were damp, and there must have been a spring nearby, for her skin shone. She smiled softly as she sauntered up to him. The vulnerability of the previous night was gone from her features, replaced by her usual calm confidence. She leaned her body into his though, and there was something like relief in the gesture. 

“You smell like campfire.” She said with a smile in her voice. ”Hmm, but also like dirt. Which I like less. Go wash, or no breakfast. We are not hippies, Barton.”

He laughed loudly and gave her a playful shove as he ducked into the tent to retrieve his pack to wash. 

She’d been right, yesterday.

The choice to be free did get easier. When it was worth it.


End file.
